Word.ws English Dictionary

furniture music

furniture music noun: background music originally played by live performers.

Noun

furniture music (uncountable)

  1. Background music originally played by live performers.
    • Furniture music is thus more like a chair than a painting in a gallery. One sits in rather than contemplates the chair. So too furniture music: “it creates vibration; it has no other purpose; it fills the same role as light, warmth and comfort in all its forms.”2018, John T. Lysaker, Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 84

Origin of furniture music

Calque of French musique d'ameublement (literally “furnishing music”), coined by Erik Satie in 1917.

Questions about furniture music

What does furniture music mean?
Furniture music means background music originally played by live performers.
What part of speech is furniture music?
Furniture music is a noun.

Words near furniture music in the dictionary

  1. furnisht
  2. Furniss
  3. furniture
  4. furniture beetle
  5. furniture beetles
  6. furniture music
  7. furniture polish
  8. furniture polishes
  9. furniture poverty
  10. furnitured
  11. furnitureless

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: furniture music (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “furniture music.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/furniture_music. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.